Memorial Day: When We Remember the Fallen

Veterans Day is the day we remember all who served in our nation's wars. Memorial Day is the day we remember those in the military that were killed in the nation's wars.

In my view Memorial Day, that began as a movement of Southern women decorating the graves of the Southern soldiers in the Civil War, is more important. That's because history is told by the victors, by the survivors. It is hard enough to remember those who died fighting for the winning side. But those who died for the losers!

History is written by the winners, we are told, and of course those who supported the losers, or who died for the losers, get very short shrift in the narratives of the winners.

We like to brand the soldiers with the virtues of our side and the vices of the other side, but in truth the young men called to serve their governments have little choice in the matter. They must serve and they must fight, and many of them must die. The victors usually brand the loser soldiers as villains, for fighting for the bad guys. But who really has the wisdom and the virtue to know who is in the right, and who indeed possesses the insane courage to kick against hearth and home when the call to the colors is made?

So what about the young American men that fought and died for the Brits in the Revolutionary War? What do we know of them? The soldiers that fought and died for the slaveholding South in the Civil War? The young Germans that fought for Hitler?

The truth is that those that died in the losing cause are lost to history and to memory, for it cannot be that the winners were wrong. And as we see, with the recent demolition of monuments, there are plenty of people that want the inconvenient past to be obliterated. And young men are scooped up to fight in today's war whether they will or not.

This was brought out to me by a tourist guide in Guatemala, who told how brothers could be found fighting on opposite sides in the long civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. Why would they do that? Because young men could be drafted by the government or the rebels: whichever was in town on the day that a young man would be scooped up and set to fight. And once you are drafted and enlisted, desertion is desertion.

Let us all remember the young men chewed up in the government meat-grinders since time immemorial. The politicians don't care; the generals don't care. Only the families care, so long as the family even survives in this murderous and merciless world.

Villainous: Nancy You Made My Day

One of the things that our Democratic friends are learning to do beautifully is to provide folks on the "far right" with wonderful memes.

First there was President Obama and his "bitter clingers." He was speaking to some educated, evolved folks in San Francisco.

Then there was Hillary Clinton and her "basket of deplorables." She was speaking to a group of gay activists. Remember that glorious moment? The next day some wag put up a meme with "Les Deplorables" playing off a poster for Les Miserables, the musical.

And now Our Nance has come out and branded President Trump as "villainous."

Nancy, I love it. I don't know if I've been so jazzed since... Oh, I can't remember when.

It made me think about who really is villainous. Not Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They were just evil.

Because when you are talking "villainous" you are talking about some cartoon villain twisting his mustache with a villainous grin on his face. Villain is the other side of Hero, and you gotta have both in a good story.

And anyway, I thought you lefties only dealt in "hate." Either you are a woke lefty that believes in Activism and in Peaceful Protest -- not forgetting the occasional situation where the rage for social justice creates a situation where the peaceful protest is Mostly Peaceful Protest -- or you are a "hater." Period, full stop.

Anyway, Nance, you made me think about who really is "villainous."

And the answer was not long in coming. Of course! Matthew Compeyson in the BBC Dickensian series! Dickensian, for those of you that haven't yet streamed it on Amazon, is a prequel to a bunch of Dickens novels, from Christmas Carol to Bleak House. The villain of the piece, without question, is Compeyson. And believe me, Compeyson has some competition in the villainous stakes, because the series includes all our favorite Dickensian villains, from Fagin to Scrooge. And even Bill Sykes.

The reason that Compeyson -- the beast -- is villainous is that he is trying to win the love of the young rich heir Miss Havisham of Great Expectations so he can strip her of Daddy's money. And knowing what we know about what will happen to Miss Havisham by the time she turns up in Great Expectations we have absolutely no sympathy for the villainous plans of Matthew Compeyson.

But is President Trump really "villainous" in the mold of Matthew Compeyson? Because he wants to tempt the Dems to impeach him in the House of Representatives? Come on Nancy. You grow up, girl. Remember? Politics ain't beanbag.

Look, I grant you that Trump is being a bit of a naughty boy for riling up the Democratic faithful with his "hateful" tweets. And everybody knows that hateful tweets are solely a problem on the right, and that when anyone on the left proposes doxxing the kids of some pro-life protester that is an understandable reaction to the unadulterated "hate" of the "far right," which Twitter and Facebook know is completely against their Community Standards.

But Nance, honey. This current problem is Your Fault. It is Your Fault for a simple reason. You chaps and chapettes in the Democratic Party violated Rule One of democratic politics.

What is Rule One?

Rule One: When you lose a change election, you concede the election. Period, full stop.

A change election, in my book, is any election after one of the parties has won two in a row. So, if you are the party that was in power for the last two presidential terms, you concede the election if it looks like you lost.

Why is that? Because the whole point of democratic politics is to be able to Throw the Rascals Out without resort to violence and armed conflict, otherwise known as civil war. And it seems, according to the scientists, after about a century or so of democratic politics and/or universal franchise that the voters tend to want to Throw the Rascals Out after about eight to ten years of one party being in power.

And to start whingeing about the popular vote, or voter suppression, or whatever, is missing the point. Even if the Out party stole the election, you still concede. Rule One. Period. Full Stop.

Remember 1960, Nance? That was the election that the Dems probably stole in both Illinois, Richard Daley, proprietor, and in Texas, Lyndon Johnson, proprietor. Remember what happened, Nance? Richard Nixon -- Richard Nixon -- conceded the election.

No, Nancy Pelosi. President Trump is not "villainous." The problem in America right now is that you Democrats, liberals, lefties, whatever you call yourselves, are fools and knaves. You are fools and knaves because you have forgotten Rule One of democratic politics.

And President Trump is giving it to you straight, Nance, right in the solar plexus. I don't really know what the solar plexus is, but I know it is something you aim for in boxing when you are not aiming to punch your opponent in the jaw. And I know that nobody likes being punched in the solar plexus.

By the way, Nance, I expect you know that Bill Sykes' girl-friend Nancy makes a significant appearance in Dickensian. Unlike you, Nance, Dickensian's Nancy was not born to a prominent Baltimore political family that then married up by marrying money. She was, by her own admission, dead poor, and would have died if Fagin had not picked her up and fed her. Of course, Fagin didn't do that out of the kindness of his heart. He pimped Nancy out, including to the violent Jacob Marley, junior partner of the world-famous moneylending partnership of Scrooge & Marley. But Nancy seems to have been grateful to Fagin for rescuing her, even if there was a price for his assistance.

Makes you think, Nance, doesn't it. There are worse things in life than having a President of the United States twirl you around his little finger, and twist his mustache, and dare you to impeach him.

I know. The Noive! The nerve of a low-rent real-estate guy presuming to mess with the noble scion of the noble political famiglia Pelosi. There oughta be a law!

But I am going to be dining out on this "villainous" thing for months and months.

And for that, Nance, I shall be eternally grateful!

When Prophecy Fails: The Muellerites

In another proof of God's existence, I have just obtained the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It's about a millennarian group prophesying the end of the world in the early 1950s.

These researchers were investigating end-of-the-world groups when all of a sudden a report of an actual group prophesying the end of the world got reported in the paper. How could they get so lucky! Now they were not just researching second hand using other peoples' reports of historical end-of-the-world movements. Now they could get the straight scoop. They could get right into the middle of a millennarian group and see how it worked. And, most important, they could see what happened when the prophecy failed.

But first researchers Festinger, Riecken, and Schascter treat us to the story of an earlier group predicting the end of the world: the Millerites, who predicted the second coming of Christ in 1843, after the prophecy of William Miller, a New England farmer.

Let us call these Millerites the Muellerites.

The interest of the researchers in When Prophecy Fails is this: What happens after the predicted Second Coming of Christ or Day of Judgement comes and nothing happens? When, as we would say, the Mueller Report is published and No Collusion?

The answer is perfectly simple. The fervor of the Muellerites is doubled and redoubled. That's because they all talk to one another. They agree that, well, good old Bob just got the day wrong. Hey! Maybe it wasn't Collusion, but Obstruction. Yeah! That's it!

But now, you'll notice, we are onto the third possibility, offered by Our Nance, prophetess extraordinaire. It's "Cover-up." Yeah! That's it. At her age, it is easy to get confused by all those C-words and O-words. I know, 'cos I'm only 5 or 6 years younger than Speaker Nance.

What is going on here? The researchers tell us. What we have is "disconfirmation" and the disconfirmation produced "dissonance" in the minds of the believers: the dissonance between the predicted End of the Trump and the fact that he is still here!

[T]he central belief and its accompanying ideology are usually of crucial importance in the believers' lives and hence the dissonance is very strong -- and very painful to tolerate.

At some point the believers are going to have to abandon their beliefs. But not yet. So what happens in that the Muellerites talk to one another and tell each other that all educated and evolved people like themselves cannot be wrong. Why everybody who is anyone agrees that there must have been Collusion -- no, Obstruction. Wait! It's Cover-up! Yeah! That's it! Cover-up!

If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.

The point is that increased proselytizing after the disconfirmation of the prophecy puts off the evil day when the whole world of the Muellerites collapses in ruins.

So you can understand what is going on in Muellerville. We are in the early stages after the first disconfirmation of the prophecy. And so the Muellerites are doubling down.

Of course, when the original Mueller prophecy was disconfirmed back in 1843-4, the scoffers had a grand old time.

The world made merry over the old Prophet's predicament. The taunts and jeers of the "scoffers" were well nigh unbearable. If any of Mueller's followers walked abroad, they ran the gauntlet of merciless ridicule...

The rowdy element in the community would not leave them alone.

You'd have to say, in another proof of God's existence, that President Trump is just the "scoffer" or the "rowdy element" needed in our national hour of need.

And I am afraid that it is not likely that he is likely to leave Our Nance at peace in her dissonance. He is going to continue scoffing. The naughty boy.

But for the True Believers, there is still Climate Change. Only 12 years to go, says Prophetess AOC.

Fortunately, the Climate Change Believers always predict the End of the World about 10 years in the future. So the future never comes.

Take Your Pick: Impeachment or Infrastructure?

So now President Trump has kiboshed the glorious $2 trillion infrastructure pork-fest because Our Nance insulted him with an accusation of "cover-up."

Yah Boo Sucks! Or whatever angry politicians yell at each other these days.

The amusing thing to me is that "collusion" and "cover-up" is an apt description of all politics-as-usual. Politics is the game of cutting deals by colluding with your political pals to carve up the loot. What is the difference between  colluding with Putin (over what exactly?) and the renewable energy subsidy barons? And of course it is essential to cover-up the gory details of the collusion because, well, every politician is supposed to be a man (or woman) of the people, and innocent of all collusions and cover-ups. I believe that the universal procedure for hiding collusions and cover-ups is the cut-out. If you want to gin up a dossier of sensational accusations you don't hire someone to gin them up; you hire someone to hire someone else to hire another guy to gin up the accusation dossier. That way, like Sgt. Schultz, you know nothing!

But, of course, every politician is always sniffing around for the despicable goings-on of the colluders and cover-uppers in the other party. Because.

To which one has to say: it takes one to know one.

I suspect that the bigger picture is that Our Nance is batting on a bit of a sticky wicket. After riling up the partisans for three years of collusion and conspiracy theories, the Democratic faithful expect blood. How to let them down gently?

I wouldn't know, because I'm not a politician and I don't know how the experts do the riling-up and the riling-down.

I suspect though, that the job of Hillary Clinton on the day after the November 2016 election was to concede the election, rile-down her supporters, declare that we are all Americans, and wait until next time.

But she didn't, and now Our Nance and Our Chuck are stuck with figuring out what to do with the riled-up partisans with still 18 months to go before the 2020 election. Do you tell them to take a nap for 6 months and worry about waking them up again for the election? Or do you keep them all at fever pitch for the next 18 months and hope that they don't fall asleep from exhaustion on Election Day 2020?

Honestly, I have no idea, none at all. All I know is that President Trump seems to have a certain instinct about how to play this game, and so far, he has come out ahead in the Trash-Talking Stakes.

And there seems to be a certain low cunning in the notion that we can't talk about handing out the loot from infrastructure spending until you chaps stop harrying me with your investigatory yap-dogs.

Mind you. I am very uncertain about this infrastructure spending idea. I am afraid it will all be spent on mass transit and bike paths for gentry-liberal twenty-somethings, renewable energy and subsidies for electric cars and replacement blades for wind farms. Instead of good old roads, bridges and freeways for the deplorables and bitter clingers driving to work in their SUVs.

But what do I know.

Think of Big Tech Censorship as an Opportunity

Everyone is worried and riled up about social media censorship and data harvesting. Not to be endured.

It's a problem. But not the one we think it is. For instance, I am coming to think that the mindless censorship of conservatives by Facebook and others is a strategic mistake for Facebook and its pals in the ruling class. It puts the question of free speech on the radar. And since, right now, it is hurting us deplorables, then it is likely to enrage more of us deplorables to the point that we might do something about it.

I was reading about the inclusion of Candace Owens on a mid-level Facebook "hate agents" list. The article shows her hate list entry on a secret screen image. Really, Facebook censors? Really? The anodyne center-right Candace Owens? She is a threat to our "community standards?" Hey, Facebook: I gotta bridge to sell you. And Owens was suspended for a message where she says that "White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is." You think?

Look, I get that you Facebook censors are young millennials that have never read a book, and that, in the words of Ben Rhodes, "literally know nothing," But you really could do a better job of hiding it.

But in accordance with my maxim, that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice," I say: Get it on. The more you dumb-as-posts SJW millennials censor and marginalize us the angrier we will get. And the more elections we will win.

I've been thinking about free speech, partly in response to reading Voltaire's Bastards, a flawed book that really doesn't get it. Author John Ralston Saul (a fan of IPCC founder Maurice Strong) knows that there is something wrong with the faith in reason bequeathed to us by the Age of Reason. But so far, he is flapping around at page 425 and counting and completely missing the point. Rather like his hero Maurice Strong, the real author of "we only have 10 years to live before the climate kills us all!"

The thing about free speech in the age of Voltaire was that the Enlightenment intellectuals needed free speech to get their message out and to cow the ruling class into letting middle-class scribblers acquire more status. They were a rising class and they thought that they didn't get no respect from the nobles and the courtiers in the ruling class of the age, that were as dumb as posts. Reason was a club with which to beat the nobles and the courtiers into admitting the scribblers to polite society.

Fast forward and what do we have? Ordinary middle-class deplorables that don't get no respect from the gentry liberals and the Democratic operatives with bylines in the media. We notice that the first reaction of today's educated ruling class is to censor our speech and marginalize us as the "far right."

Of course they do. The natives are restless and the first response of every colonial governor is a show of force to teach the natives who is boss.

But what our ruling-class pals have not done is think about their responsibility as rulers. Like most rulers down the ages they cannot think very far beyond the notion that, by golly, the purpose of society is identical to the class interest of us, the rulers. In our day this class interest of the rulers is the class interest of the educated class and their political clients. Back in the day, our evil slaveholder Founders recognized that the continuance of their rule involved accommodating people that didn't agree with them; there should be a public square in which all views could get heard. But they were slaveholders; what did they know?

A similar problem is the erosion of privacy due to big media data harvesting and government surveillance, discussed by the Zman.

Let's not think of privacy as a problem, but as an opportunity.

Think about privacy this way. Back in the day, when everyone lived in agricultural villages, there was no privacy. The women knew everything that was going on, and they used their knowledge to control things. But there was an out. If you got in trouble, you could always leave and disappear. Because there was no global online database of miscreants. If you were in New England back in the day, you could just disappear and head "out west."

Then came the industrial city and its anonymity. The telling point is that, in response to the social chaos, society invented the urban police force to control the uncontrollable youths and gangs that were terrorizing honest citizens. You can read Dickens to get a flavor of the colorful mixture of anti-social characters that urban anonymity set free.

Now we are returning to a society where everyone knows everything about you. OK, fine. That means that we are going to have to codify rules about privacy into law and into the unwritten law of the culture. I don't know how it will end up, but it is coming, and it is coming because various victims of the lack of privacy will get riled up and demand justice.

Of course, we won't get justice, but we might get a reduction of injustice.

And Now the Aussies

First Brexit, then Trump, now Oz. And every time the polls had it wrong. And every time the ruling class was insulted, outraged.

What is going on here?

I think it is the fundamental division between the ruling class -- any ruling class -- and the people it rules.

What the people want is to be protected. First of all, they want to be protected from enemies foreign and domestic. Second, they want the space to wive and thrive: to have a job; to have a home; to marry and raise those kids. And they expect a bit of free stuff in return for their votes. And you'd better not ever take that free stuff away. 'Cos we paid for those bennies with our taxes.

But the ruling class is different. It wants to imagine itself in a higher sphere than merely guarding the borders, or punishing the local ruffians. Actually, our pals Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out over a century ago that the policeman's lot is not a happy one.

So the policing classes like to cloak their constabulary duties in finer robes than you would think is strictly necessary. Kings like to think of themselves as descended from gods; nobles like to imagine their blood finer than the coarse blood of the common folk.

And the priests: they like us to think that their pronouncements come direct from God.

And when constabulary duty's to be done, the rulers also like to think that they are not just defending the border but saving the world from disaster.

And, really, if we are talking about saving the world -- usually within the next 10 years -- then the present emergency justifies the rulers accessing extraordinary powers for themselves and their supporters. Because we have only 10 years to save the world!

You can see that there tends to be a certain distance between the rulers' idea of government's role in the world and the notions that the ruled-over have about government.

In the case of Brexit we see the distance between the Euro elite's idea of their role, which was that the bloodbaths of the first half of the 20th century were caused by nationalism. Thus, according to the Zman, "The lesson learned by Western elites was that nationalism leads to competition, which then leads to war." -- unless wisely controlled and managed by themselves. But to the average Brit White Van Man, it looks like the toffs have created a nice little privileged world for themselves while the ordinary British bloke gets to touch his forelock and say "morning, squire," or "yes, master" like Igor.

Then with Trump we have the divide between the educated elite and the average US deplorable or bitter clinger. It's telling that the deplorable meme was launched by Hillary Clinton addressing a gay group and the bitter-clingers meme was launched by Barack Obama addressing a fundraiser in San Francisco. These two politicos exactly demonstrate the distance between the urban elites and the folks in flyover country.

The point to understand is that the deplorables and the bitter clingers are the white working class that Democrats looved back in the day and that Democrats promised to protect from the evil robber barons and employers and corporate honchos. The workers don't want airy-fairy notions of the good society or saving the world from racists, sexists, homophobes, and climate deniers. They just want a decent job and freedom from layoffs. And education for the kids.

Now the rot has spread to Australia where against all the predictions and polls the Liberal-National coalition has won the recent election against the Australian Labor Party. Just like our Democratic Party, the Oz Labor Party is an urban sophisticate's party, worrying about intersectionality and about saving the world from climate change. The homeland of the the Liberal-Nationals is in the natural-resource state of Queensland where coal mining is a big deal. The homelands of Labor are the gentry fiefdoms of Sydney and Melbourne.

Melbourne, when I visited a few years ago, is an urbanist's wet dream, complete with heavy rail, light rail, buses, and bike lanes. Used to be that Melbourne was a manufacturing city, making cars and such. Not any more.

Notice that the green energy revolution proposes to subsidize the places where the educated ruling-class lives in urban enclaves with subsidized electric cars and rooftop solar panels. Not to mention that the educated class also gets the well-paid careers in corporations and government and education. And the ordinary deplorable that lives in the cheaper areas on the edge of town gets to pay full price.

The final nail in the coffin is that the educated ruling-class represents its self-dealing politics as a moral crusade to save the marginalized of the world and the very planet itself.

But, of course. Rulers have always wrapped themselves in the robes of God.

But sometimes the rubes rebel and tell the kings and the priests to get lost.

Fighting Social Media Censorship

I understand why social media censors conservatives. It just makes life easier, because the left has activist groups up the ying-yang belaboring corporations for whatever. Activism is what lefties do. It's the modern equivalent of the medieval flagellants. So if social media wants to stay out of trouble, toadying to the left is good policy. Plus most of the youngsters working for social media are haters and fearers that have been carefully taught to hate and to fear anyone that does not agree with them.

But in the last couple of days we have seen Facebook censoring Trump 2020 advisory board member Jenna Ellis Rives for sharing a "pro-life post from blogger Matt Walsh, pointing out how transgender activism undermines key pro-choice arguments. Facebook flagged the post for 'hate speech.'"

And now it is Michelle Malkin's turn. What did she do? She protested the deplatforming of Gavin McInnes and Laura Loomer. So Facebook deleted her post.

UPDATE: And Blexit activist Candace Owens. Because you can't say that welfare state has screwed black families. And Heritage Foundation. Because you can't say that trans men in women's sports is ridiculous.

Therefore: Censored. Straight up. Because thou shalt not blaspheme the liberal narrative.

It's pretty obvious what is going on here. Anything that protests or disagrees with out ruling-class notions of right and wrong is vile extremism and is not to be endured.

So now the White House has launched "a website that asks people who think their viewpoints have been censored by social media platforms to share their stories" oh, and, the New York Times adds,
"their contact information." See? It's just a cynical fundraising play from the racist sexist homophobic Commander-in-Chief.

Funny how conservatives all think that the Southern Law Poverty Center is nothing more than a cynical fundraising operation and its hate-group map is nothing more than bubba bait for liberals.

Whereas the liberal watchmen at The New York Times see cynical fundraising operations in completely different places. I wonder why?

Hey, maybe The New York Times is right about this. Or maybe the Trump social-media censorship reporting website is part of a strategic plan to rile up the deplorables in advance of the 2020 election.

You know. Just like the Democrats have been riling up the base for the last two years over Trump Russia Collusion. Or is that different? Because Yellow Hair?

Christopher DeGroot has something to say about all of this today.

[I]t is extremely difficult, in the effectively post-Christian West, for people who have incompatible values to coexist without profound and intractable struggle. For where Christianity, through a common belief system, once provided social order and cohesion, today there is endless conflict and, in many cases, no rational solution is available.

The point is that, in Christian times, at least we all lived under the same God. But now in post-Christian times we have the ruling class believing in another God. And it is not surprising that the new believers are enthusiastic about their beliefs and believe that the old beliefs are superstitions and bigotry, trying to take us back to the bad old days of the Inquisition and witch hunts.

The obvious example of this is abortion. If you are pro-life you believe that children and posterity are the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thus abortion is a vile attack on everything you hold dear. But for the pro-choice people an unwanted pregnancy prevents a woman from reaching her true potential. Where is the common ground there, where the possibility for tolerance and compromise?

DeGroot quotes Chesterton: "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."

Notice that my reductive Three Peoples theory is a deep and wise understanding of the human condition, that there are at least three kinds of people: subordinates, responsibles, and creatives, and this is natural and physical. If you accept the world view of my theory then it is a simple step to understand that the moral framework for our society must comprehend the different moral universes of the three different peoples.

See, my theory is that there are a lot of People of the Subordinate Self around -- the helpless victimsn for whom the left advocates -- and they will find that a society that does not accommodate their need for social programs to support people like them is simply unjust. Similarly, there are a lot of People of the Responsible Self around -- deplorables we call them -- and they want a world of definite rules and roles, and will find a society without clear rules and roles that values the solid citizen a society that is simply unjust.

Then, of course, we have the People of the Creative Self -- mostly well-born scions of the ruling class. They expect a society that encourages them and congratulates them on living creative lives, extending to creative lifestyles. To them, any society that enforces rigid rules and roles is simply unjust.

So what do we do about it?

Well, I'd say that we need to start with the notion of true "diversity" shining out of my Three Peoples theory. Once you understand that people are different, and likely to remain so, then your values and your political agenda will naturally reflect that world view.

At least there is this. My Three Peoples world view can't be any worse than the lefty world view that wants a Great Reaction towards socialism or neo-slavery, the welfare state or neo-feudalism, and identity politics or neo-tribalism.

And one thing we have learned from our lefty friends is that they cannot even begin to understand why anyone would think differently than they.